Cronica is back with a couple of releases, a better exposure and the usual good quality of their outputs just to say that if you haven’t noticed that, Portugal like Spain is an epicentre for what concerns electronic music nowadays. As you can see from their back catalogue Cronica is not one of those label into “easy electronic” at every coast, but more 360° oriented and this cd is the proof of it all. Vitor Joaquim pushes on the pedal of experimental/abstract electronic music and the result is probably closer to sound art than to ordinary electronic recording. Cold inexpressive music right from the first intentions, Joaquim put every single layer trying to define gradually every chapter. A profusion of resonators, high frequencies and glitchy beats and synthesized vocals (be it a vocoder or a laptop) but the record is really tight and compact sound wise. “Flow” comes out from that experimental electronic music that floats nowhere in the middle of contemporary electronic research post Stockhausen and isolationism a-la late eighties early nineties. Probably it’s just me but the closest reference that came to my mind was Main above all when the band post-Loop was completely lost in abstraction. This cd feature an interesting clip with which the music of Joaquim gets along really well, it’s a soft and simple computer work but it has a strange manga atmosphere while the global watching is stoning.
Andrea Ferraris